17 May 2016

Here's the intro:
"I have recently come across Georges C. Williams’ arguments for why genes and memes should be defined as information, in his 1992 book Natural Selection. I had seen quotes from Williams made by many proponents of the meme idea but had yet to see for myself how he argued that information is what genes and memes are made of. I found that Williams had a great insight into the true nature of replicators, maybe the most precise understanding that I have come across so far. However, I also believe that Williams made a slight but important mistake in his argumentation. The mistake is that Williams is confusing two very different understandings of the concept of information."

And here's the conclusion:
"I hope I have made it clear that information is an often misunderstood and a misused concept, particularly among memeticists. Information is best understood as a subjective experience that is confined to our minds (and computers’ “minds”) and does not travel into the outside world. The only thing that travels between brains are codes. Codes can be said to be informative for they have a potential to cause meaning. Codes can be transcoded into other codes and form long codical chains of trancodes. However, these transcodes are not to be considered equal in the eyes of evolution as they compete for survival. The codes that end up being truly copied, i.e. with the same medium and the same recognisable pattern, are the replicators. Replicators are typically found to be among codes exchanged between interactors. Information theory can be useful for memeticists because it studies some of the codes’ properties."

25 April 2016

In her influential 1999 book, The Meme Machine (chapter 5) Susan blackmore raised three important problems about memetics. Each problem was titled as follow: "We cannot specify the unit of a meme", "We do not know the mechanism for copying and storing memes", "Memetic evolution is Lamarckian". These three problems are still largely relevant today, as progress with memetics is proving to be slow. However I think my proposed views on memetics, which I call the code model, could help answering or clearing up some of those points.

5 November 2015

Objections to Daniel Dennett’s informational meme.

The concept of information seems to agree with the meme idea, and that is why many memeticists equate memes with information. This view is currently championed by Daniel Dennett himself and it is his own arguments that I want to scrutinise here. I myself also assumed that describing memes as information was a fair bet or at least that it would not hurt the meme idea. I came to discover how Dennett insists on describing memes (and genes) as information, to the point where this would be the only right way of describing memes, as opposed to codes for example. This got me thinking. Considering that I define memes as codes myself (link), I was compelled to try and find out whether the concept of information is a better way to describe memes or not. This is my attempt to better understand Dennett’s information and to find out whether information is really fit to serve as a model for memes.